Creating Confident Leaders - Lose the Guilt

A few weeks ago I gave you some of my top tips for developing self belief, the foundation of confident leadership and one of those tips was to stop trying to take responsibility for everything and feeling guilty you can’t solve every problem…….

To remind you, I spoke about being clear about your levels of responsibility and that of others, as leaders who take responsibility for everything everyone does and feels in their teams, very quickly lose confidence and become ineffective.   There are many things leaders are responsible for, however, trying to take everyones’ burdens onto your shoulders just weighs you down and is a sure way to develop a guilt ridden and guilt driven mindset.  I wanted to share some deeper understanding and tips to deal with this in this weeks blog.

Guilt is a helpful emotional warning sign when it signals questions and prompts us to examine our behaviour and thinking in order to break patterns that are not serving us or others.  This is healthy because it prompts change and aligns us to our true values.  However, all too often guilt becomes a default emotion that traps us and paralyses us.  Guilt is also in an emotional polarity relationship to resentment and many people swing between guilt and resentment in lots of areas of their lives.  This is not healthy as it serves no purpose and simply drags us down.

Leaders cannot afford to get caught in the guilt trap, as it will cause their confidence and leadership ability to drop and spiral downwards.   So how can you avoid the guilt trap?

If you have genuinely done something that feels misaligned with your values or has hurt you or someone else, then take action to fix the problem!  Sometimes an apology is all that is needed, other times a specific change in behaviour.  For example a client of mine was prone to be leave important work to the last minute as she felt that the adrenaline produced by a deadline helped her to focus. However, as she became more senior, this behaviour started to cause serious problems for her team.   We talked about the fact that she felt guilty about this but was still holding onto her feeling that this was how she produced her best work.  We explored how she could manage this and she came up with 2 strategies – firstly look at her areas of work and which ones involved others to any extent.  We talked about the deadline for her being the time they needed her input, not the final deadline, so she could still work in the way she wanted but took account of their time also.   Secondly, those areas which she needed to fully delegate rather than inputting right at the end and often disrupting work others had done.  She took action on these and the relationship between her and her team improved massively as a result plus she stopped feeling guilty.  This is an example of where “healthy” guilt helped someone to take action and fix a problem.

Conversely, another client was caught up in feeling that she should solve all her teams problems and feeling terribly guilty if she didn’t do that.  She took everything personally and got quite emotionally caught up and extremely stressed.   Over time this started to paralyse her decision making and ability to tackle problems. Her team liked her a lot and then also started to feel guilty about “making her feel bad”, so stopped taking things to her and hid problems from her.  The refrain was “…………… will just get upset and take it personally and I don’t want to make her more anxious”.  Obviously this then became a downward spiral for her and the team.  She wasn’t leading and everyone was struggling.  This was extremely unhealthy guilt not leading to action and creating more and more problems.

For her we had to work very clearly on what were her boundaries of responsibility and help her to realise that she was not “responsible” for all of her teams’ emotional problems.  Emotional contagion was a very difficult area for this leader.  She was empathic but the boundary between empathy and taking on the problem was an issue for her.  It took time but she started to ask herself the questions “Is this really my responsibility?  Is there genuinely anything I could have done differently?   How can I help this person solve their own problem?.”   As she started to ask those questions, she then started to draw boundaries, stop getting upset and stressed and instead take action where she could but also encourage her team to deal with their own feelings differently.

So draw those boundaries, take action where you can and recognise the difference between healthy and unhealthy guilt. 

Lose the guilt and lead more confidently.

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